About

Kathryn Morgan is the Joan Palevsky Professor of Classics at UCLA, with broad interests in Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Her teaching includes graduate seminars on Attic tragedy, Pindar, Greek lyric, and Plato. Her research moves between projects connected with Plato and Pindar, exemplified by her book Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato and her ongoing involvement in the series Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, where she is responsible for chapters covering Plato. Her notable work includes her 2015 book Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C., which offers a groundbreaking reading of Pindar's poetry for Hieron of Syracuse, framing it within a broader cultural program involving athletic, political, and architectural achievements. Her ongoing research includes projects on historical narrative in Aeschylus' Persians, Pindaric politics, and Plato’s adaptation of Greek comedy and lyric, with a current focus on how Plato engaged with Greek historiography, especially Thucydides. Morgan has served on various committees within the Society for Classical Studies and was department Chair at UCLA from 2014-2020. She has received distinguished teaching awards from the American Philological Association and UCLA and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in Fall 2023.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Social Science
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Geometry
• Art
• Mathematics
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• <i>Sophia</i> before the Sophists

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.

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• Socratic Emotions

  2022-02-09

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• Pop music in informal foreign language learning

  ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Psychology

  Abstract There is currently little information about the kinds of foreign language pop music, songs and activities used by language learners in informal learning contexts. This systematic analysis provides an overview of research from 2010–2020 in an attempt to describe how foreign language learners find, listen to, and engage with pop songs from another country or culture and how this can lead to increased informal language learning, using qualitative observations and interview responses found in published articles to conduct thematic analysis using grounded theory. Thematic analysis resulted in six themes within the peer-reviewed qualitative journal articles, and we argue that more research is needed into learner perspectives and about how learners engage autonomously with L2 pop music in informal language learning.

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• Parmenides and the Language of Constraint

  BRILL eBooks · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science
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• Mythological Role-Playing among the Sophists

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021-11-26 · 1 citations

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• Eros in the Platonic Frame

  2020-11-18

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• Paying the Price: Contextualizing Exchange in<b><i>Phaedo</i></b>69<b>a</b>–<b>c</b>

  Rhizomata · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Literature
  • Art

  Abstract This paper uses a problematic passage at Phaedo 69 a – c as a case study to explore the advantages we can gain by reading Plato in his cultural context. Socrates argues that the common conception of courage is strange: people fear death, but endure it because they are afraid of greater evils. They are thus brave through fear. He proposes that we should not exchange greater pleasures, pains, and fears for lesser, like coins, but that there is the only correct coin, for which we must exchange all these things: wisdom ( phronēsis ). Commentators have been puzzled by the precise nature of the exchange envisaged here, sometimes labelling the coinage metaphor as inept, sometimes describing this stretch of argument as “religious” and thus not to be taken seriously. The body of the paper looks at (1) the connection between money and somatic materialism, (2) the incommensurability in Plato of financial and ethical orders, (3) financial metaphors outside Plato that connect coinage with ethics, (4) intrinsic and use values in ancient coinage, and (5) Athenian laws on coinage, weights, and measures that reflect anxiety about debased coins in the fifth and early fourth centuries. It sees the Phaedo passage as the product of a sociopolitical climate which facilitated the consideration of coinage as an embodiment of a value system and which connected counterfeit or debased currency with debased ethical types. Athenians in the early fourth century were much concerned with issues of commensurability between different currencies and with problems of debasement and counterfeiting; understanding this makes Socrates’ use of coinage metaphors less puzzling. Both the metaphor of coinage and the other metaphors in this passage of the Phaedo (painting and initiation) engage with ideas of purity, genuineness, and deception. Taken as a group, these metaphors cover a large area of contemporary popular culture and are used to illustrate a disjunction between popular and philosophical ways of looking at value.

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• Pythian 3: Victory over Vicissitude

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-01-22

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  Abstract Pythian 3 is a counterfactual epinician that mentions victory in the games as something long past and dwells on a present of sickness and disappointment. It elaborates again the model of failed human interaction with the divine, presenting the fates of Koronis and Asklepios. Constraints on mortal nature are reflected in unattainable wishes and counterfactual constructions. The poem opens with a wish for Hieron’s miraculous healing, but the myths of Koronis and Asklepios show how the poet must pass beyond mythological fantasy to what is possible: his immortalization of Hieron in song. The vision of poetry’s triumph over death is communicated through intertextuality with Homer’s Iliad. Pindar’s insistence on the possible normalizes Hieron’s position in the Greek world order. Hieron’s illness gives the poet the opportunity to deepen our conception of victory and appreciate the effects of vicissitude even on the fortunate.

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• Pythian 1: A Civic Symphony

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-01-22 · 1 citations

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• Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C.

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-01-22 · 171 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the praise poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the songs composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic preeminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all of Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court and contextualize this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes develop a specifically "tyrannical" mythology in which a hero from the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin on himself or herself by failing to manage this closeness appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does) protect himself by regal virtue.

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Frequent coauthors

• Kathryn Bosher

  Northwestern University

  5 shared

• Benjamin Acosta‐Hughes

  2 shared

• John D. Camp

  Iowa Lutheran Hospital

  1 shared

• Michael Ierardi

  1 shared

• Ruby Blondell

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Jeremy McInerney

  1 shared

• Stefano Vassallo

  1 shared

• Lucía Rodríguez‐Noriega Guillén

  Universidad de Oviedo

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Philological…
• Distinction in Teaching at the Graduate Level from UCLA (200…